Quantifying thresholds for native vegetation to salinity and waterlogging for the design of direct conservation approaches

TL;DRAbstract

A field-based project was undertaken to develop and test a mechanism which would allow for the correlation of the health of vegetation surrounding playa lakes in south-west Australia with the natural variation in salinity and waterlogging that occurs spatially and temporally in natural systems. The study was designed to determine threshold ranges of vegetation communities using moderately extensive data over short temporal periods which will guide the design of potential engineering solutions that manipulate hydrological regimes to ultimately conserve and protect native vegetation. A pair of playa lake ecosystems, surrounded by primary production land, was modelled with hydro-geological data collected from March 2006 to March 2007. The data was used to determine the hydroperiods of vegetation communities fringing playa lakes and provide insight into the areas and species that are most affected by extreme rainfall events which are hypothesised to have a significant, rapid deleterious ef

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